EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS 181 



said in his sea-slime theory, he follows so j)rimi- 

 tive a naturalist as Anaximander ; and in judg- 

 ing of his supposed anticipation of the cell doc- 

 trine of Schleiden and Schwann (1838) , we must 

 keep in mind the stress that is laid throughout all 

 his philosophy upon the spherical form of his 

 metaphysical 'All.' The skull, for example, he 

 believed to be one of these manifestations of the 

 archetypal sphere; it is not surprising that he 

 conceived the cell as a sphere. 



There is thus room for wide differences of 

 opinion about Oken; his writings are such com- 

 pounds of apparent sense and actual nonsense, 

 that only by selecting and putting together cer- 

 tain favorably read passages, can we accord him 

 the rank Haeckel claims for him as a prophet, 

 whereas if we review as a whole his elements of 

 'physio-philosophy,' it appears that his prophe- 

 cies of one page are capable upon the following 

 page of interpretation as the vaguest specula- 

 tions and absurdities. 



Oken pubhshed his outline of the Grundriss 

 der NaturpliilosoiMe in 1802, the same year in 

 which Lamarck and Treviranus independently 

 outlined their principles of biology and evolu- 

 tion. Oken's work is certainly not to be men- 

 tioned in the same breath with theirs, from the 

 modern standpoint. His work upon generation 

 • — Die Zeugung — appeared in 1805, containing 



